Bitcoin History, from 2010 to 2013

We’ve looked at the situations surrounding the conception of Bitcoin in our previous article, and if you haven’t seen it. Take a look at it here.

There wasn’t a lot of noise or interest at first, therefore not a lot of things happened in that period, but these following three years are packed full with information.

February 6th, the first ever Bitcoin currency exchange is established. Bitcoin Market. Unfortunately it doesn’t work anymore, but that was the way it was started. It featured Automated and Escrow trading, multiple payment processing options, including PayPal (until they discontinued this option in 2011, due to charge-back fraud), trader ratings and private messages.

May 22nd, Bitcoin Pizza Holiday! The first real world transaction was made on Bitcoin Forums where a programmer based in Florida, Laszlo Hanyecz offered to pay 10.000 BTC for couple of pizzas. Someone took him up on that offer. $7 million USD pizza, anyone? You can click on the pizza below to take a look at the forum thread! 😉

July 7th, We’re looking at the release of Bitcoin version 0.3 which a few days later drives a large number of new users through Slashdot, where they mentioned the update.

July 17th, Probably following the influx of a lot of new Bitcoin users, the price of one Bitcoin increases ten times it’s worth by the time the calendar reached this date. MtGox is established on the same day as well, which is the highly mentioned currency exchange market that’s widely mentioned anytime Bitcoin and hacking topics come up in an environment. The next day OpenGL GPU mining software comes online that allows people to mine using their graphic processing units.

August 15th, An exploit has been discovered and exploited. This exploitation caused the generation of 184 billion Bitcoins. A fork was employed on the blockchain to prevent further damage, and only 8 hours of work were lost.

September 18th, Slush Pool becomes operational, allowing multiple users to collectively mine Bitcoin and share based on POW. They mine their first block the very same day.

October 16th, The first escrow Bitcoin trade happens on the Bitcoin Forums, and the very next day a IRC freenode channel appears to help facilitate Bitcoin trading.

November 6th, The price of one Bitcoin is $0.50 USD on MtGox. Market cap is calculated to exceed $1 million USD. The total number of Bitcoin in circulation is 2 million.

December 9th, The difficulty exceeds 10.000 meaning that more and more people have joined the mining efforts, thus driving difficulty upwards.

Happy new year! The Silk Road is established and opens it’s doors for prospective entrepreneurs. The marketplace that caused a lot of negative publicity for Bitcoin.

January 8th, Slush Pool is the leader of pool mining operations, and on this date they reached 10.000 MH/s.

January 28th, 25% of all Bitcoin has been mined. The generation of Block 105000 means that 5.25 million Bitcoins are in circulation, totaling a little bit more than 25% of the full available amount of 21 million BTC.

Februrary 9th, Bitcoin = USD. For the first time in history, the price for one bitcoin is equal to $1 USD. This is a major turning point in the fate of Bitcoin and a huge selling point that causes a lot of new users to start getting curious about Bitcoin. The very next day, www.bitcoin.org is basically under heavy traffic which causes the website to struggle with serving all of the visitors.

February 14th, Australian Bitcoin Forum user is the first one to offer a vehicle in exchange for Bitcoin, his 1984 Celica Supra vehicle for 3000 BTC. Whether he sold it or not, that’s a mystery. I would ask him, but he hasn’t been online at the forum since April 02, 2013.

February 25th, On this date, the website that created the most popular and watched video relating to Bitcoin was registered under the domain www.WeUseCoins.com, they’ve created a price tracker for Bitcoin that earns you free coins. You can find it on their website.

March 6th, MtGox is sold to a Japanese company named Tibanne. On the same date a mystery miner stops mining which causes the computational power to go from 900 GH/s to 500 GH/s. Some people speculate that it’s a botnet that got outdated, or a supercomputer that left the network. We will probably never know the truth.

March 25th, Bitcoin mining difficulty lowers by 10%. The causes for this are uncertain. Maybe connected to the mystery miner that left the network, or simply due to the allocation of computational power to an altcoin.

April 5th, Bitcoin users get even more possibilities to trade for other currencies, when Bitmarket.eu opened. It turned out to be a soggy and sore story, when 20.000 of customer BTC were forever lost.

April 23rd, BTC = EURO, for the first time since it started, one Bitcoin is equal to one euro or GBP. This happened on MtGox, and at the time the total value of Bitcoin in circulation was approximately $10 million USD.

April 30th, The mining difficulty for bitcoin goes over 100.000!

June 2nd, in just a few short months after reaching parity with the USD, the price for BTC reached $10 USD on MtGox. This was an all time high for that particular date.

June 8th, Another all time high when Bitcoin reached $31.91 on MtGox just six days after reaching the previous peak! I could sure go for one pizza right about now. 🙂

June 12th, Sad news everyone. The price of BTC drops to $10 again, marking the largest price decrease of a commodity to date. This incident is to be known as the Great Bubble of 2011. Only works to show how volatile Bitcoin was just 5 years ago.

June 13th, Forum member allinavain, has reported that 25.000 BTC has been stolen from his wallet. Unfortunately I couldn’t find a link to share with you guys. At the time, this amount was worth $375.000 USD.

June 19th, Alarm! MtGox is majorly breached on this date. 60.000 MtGox accounts and their information is compromised, when a hacker accessed an admin account. The site had to be shutdown for seven days straight and the price of BTC plummeted down to $0.01 USD on MtGox.

The very same day, TradeHill and Britcoin stop trading in order to review their security measures. The hack on MtGox provided usernames and passwords that users carelessly had on multiple sites, where some people reported losing over 2.000 BTC. 🙁

June 24th, The difficulty of mining passes 1 million for the first time with the generation of Block 133056.

June 29th, BitPay launches the first bitcoin wallet app for smartphones.

July 26th, The third largest Bitcoin Exchange Bitomat, eliminates 17.000 BTC for their clients, when they carelessly lose access to their wallet.dat file.

August 5th, MyBitcoin reports that they’ve lost 150.000 Bitcoin (troubling times for Bitcoin indeed), because of a hack that happened a week before. The total value of the Bitcoins in question was $2 million USD at the time.

August 20th, The first ever Bitcoin conference and Expo is held in New York City.

September 6th, The first Casacius Coins come into existence when Mike Caldwell decides to mint physical coins and load them with BTC.

November 25th, The first European bitcoin conference is held in Prague, Czech Republic.

December 12th, The largest number of fees in a block have been paid on this date. Exactly 171 BTC have been transacted in fees in Block 157235

February 13th, TradeHill, the second largest Bitcoin Exchange in the world, completely shuts down. The reasons for this are regulatory problems and the loss of $100.000 USD after losing a dispute with a payment processor.

February 27th, Bitcoin Magazine appears. The first ever information only website regarding Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency events. Just like this one. 😉

March 1st, Linode, a website hosting company is hacked and is victim to the largest theft of Bitcoin recorded to date. 46.000 BTC to be exact, with a value of around $228.000 USD at the time.

April 1st, P2SH, goes live allowing users to create specific security protocols that define how the permission to spend Bitcoin is acquired for an address. These addresses always start with the number 3 and you can learn more about them through the BIP 16 proposal.

May 8th, People love to gamble, SatoshiDICE is responsible for over 50% of the transaction volume on the blockchain.

May 9th, An FBI document about Bitcoin is leaked, where they express concerns about people using Bitcoin as a way to facilitate illicit transactions for weapons and narcotics.

May 11th, Bitcoinica is hacked! When will these exchanges learn? They lost over 18.000 BTC, with a value of about $90.000 USD.

June 1st, Coinbase is established. First as a bitcoin wallet and platform. Founded in San Francisco, California, this company has done pretty well for itself. Today it features a lot of options for users. Currency exchange and a payment processor among other things.

July 1st, A bitcoin startup incubator is launched by Adam Draper, called BoostVC. Twice a year they invest in about 20 companies to live and work with them for three months. They give out free mentoring, housing and office space, with addition to a $10k-$100k investment. All of this in exchange for 7% of your company. Think it’s a sweet deal? Check them out here.

August 20th, BitInstant mentions a Bitcoin debit card to be used through their service for transferring Bitcoin.

September 3rd, Bitfloor, the fourth largest US based Bitcoin exchange is hacked for 24.000 BTC, at a value of about $250.000 USD. Their compromised servers resulted in unauthorized access to their wallet keys. Ouch.

September 15th, London 2012 Bitcoin Conference is held. It featured speakers from the Bitcoin community like www.WeUseCoins.com creator and other developers like Stefan Thomas and Amir Taaki, but also people from outside of the Bitcoin scene like Pirate Party founder Rick Falkvinge and Digital currency theorist David Birch.

September 24th, Bitcoin Savings and Trust are under investigation regarding suspicions that they are a Ponzi scheme. The e-mail send by Phillip Moustakis, Senior Attorney in the U.S. Securities and Exchange commission announced the beginning of the investigation on this date.

September 27th, Bitcoin Foundation established, which means that a core development team and a body of overseers are dedicated on working on the protocol and currency evolution.

November 15th, WordPress.com starts to accept Bitcoin as a form of payment for it’s users.

November 28th, Block 210.000 is reached and the reward for it is 25 BTC. From that block onward, the rewards for each and every block is halved.

December 6th, Bitcoin Central is the first exchange to be licensed as a European bank, operating under the European regulatory framework.

January 22nd, BitPay makes an announcement that the total number of transactions has passed the 10.000 mark, and that there have been exactly zero cases of payment fraud.

February 1st, PizzaForCoins.com becomes operational. Probably inspired by the first ever physical purchase of pizza for 10.000 BTC (a small price to pay to be recorded in history), Matthew Birkenshaw and Riley Alexander found this start-up, which is a service that allows users to buy pizza and have it delivered with Bitcoin.

February 9th, Mega, a cloud storage company announces that they’ve begun accepting payments in Bitcoin, through their reseller, www.bitvoucher.co.

February 19th, Bitcoin version 0.8 is released and it features Bloom Filtering and provides improvements on download speeds of the network.

February 21st, Internet archive starts to accept Bitcoin donations, which they use to pay their employees in Bitcoin.

February 22nd, For the first time in two years, the price for bitcoin is back to $30 USD.

February 28th, Six days after reclaiming a long lost position, Bitcoin makes another small upward movement to $31.91 USD. This is the highest it has ever been to this date. The value continues to rise well beyond this point!

March 8th, BitInstant, a Bitcoin broker company has publicly announced that they’ve been hacked for about $12.000 USD in Bitcoin equivalent.

March 11th, A glitch in the system forces a halt in transactions. The cause being miscommunication between two different Bitcoin clients. The price drops to $37 USD, but is quickly restored by the end of the day.

March 12th, A hard fork happens on the blockchain. I wasn’t able to find relevant information regarding this fork, but it appears that it was made in order to fix future glitches like the one from the day before.

March 17th, A homeless shelter based in Pensacola, FL begins accepting Bitcoin donations.

March 28th, The total value of Bitcoin in circulation is over $1 Billion USD.

April 1st, Value of Bitcoin shoots above $100 USD.

April 10th, Bitcoin hits an all-time high of $266 USD!

April 20th, Bitcoin Central is hacked with the hackers leaving with about 400 BTC, which the site owners completely cover.

May 1st, Coindesk, a bitcoin journalist website and bitcoin resource is launched by an angel investor Shakil Khan.

This same date was when ESEA got called out for using client computers to mine bitcoin.

May 2nd, Coinlab files a lawsuit against MtGox, accusing them of breach of contract that caused $75 million USD of damage.

The same day, a Bitcoin ATM was shown for the first time in San Diego, California.

May 7th, Coinbase recieves $5 million USD from Union Square Ventures, which is to date the largest ever investment in Bitcoin start-ups.

May 14th, Homeland Security seizes $2.9 million USD from a MtGox sister company, because they failed to register as a money transmitting business.

May 18th, PrimeDice.com launches as an online casino that accepts Bitcoin deposits.

May 23rd, Bitcoin Central is hacked again, for an undisclosed amount of Bitcoin. The site owners agree to cover the damage.

June 10th, Becky and Austin launch a Kickstarter campaign to fund their documentary where they try to live 90 days only using Bitcoin.

June 26th, BitcoinWebHosting.net opens up for business. A service that offers hosting solutions for Bitcoin users, as well as domain registration and DDoS protection.

July 1st, The Winklevoss twins join the Bitcoin scene. They file an admission to U.S. Securities Exchange Commission for Winklevoss Bitcoin Trust, which provides investors with a cost-effective means to expose themselves to Bitcoin, while minimizing the credit risk associated with such maneuvers.

August 6th, Texas judge rules that Bitcoin is money! Trendon Shavers, founder of Bitcoin Savings and Trust in an attempt to avoid paying fines to SEC. Unfortunately for him, Judge Amos Mazzant ruled that “Bitcoin is a currency or form of money, and investors wishing to invest in BTCST provided an investment of money.” Unfortunate for us, the link that provided additional information about this case, has been removed from the internet.

August 9th, Bloomberg begins tracking the value of Bitcoin in real-time.

August 12th, NY State Department of Financial Services, issues a subpoena to 22 different companies that were involved with crypto currencies. This response was to “ensure” the funds, after they received complaints from consumers.

August 20th, Bitcoin becomes Private Money in Germany. The German Ministry of Finance announced recognition of Bitcoin as Private Money, and completely allowed use of Bitcoin for commercial and private purposes.

August 28th, Robocoin, a Bitcoin ATM manufacturer started accepting pre-orders for their products.

September 10th, MtGox counters Coinlab’s accusations, asking for the return of $5 million USD, claiming they belong to MtGox clients.

September 14th, PrimeDice.com announces that $15 million USD have been wagered on their website in the first 3 months of operation.

December 17th, Cental Bank of China bans purchase of Bitcoin in yuan. Bitcoin price plummets down to $500 USD

Quite eventful!

It’s been both a beautiful and difficult time for Bitcoin. A lot of things have changed over the years, but we’re still here! Information up until the end of 2013 is relatively easy to track down, but beyond this point a lot of things have happened for Bitcoin. We’re preparing an article that will take a look at the specific major events that happened from the start of 2014 till today, so make sure to stay updated!

In the meantime, tell us which event is your favorite one in the comments below! 🙂

Hey everyone, I'm an independent contributor to this awesome website! I'm a passionate writer with a focus on bitcoin-related subjects. I hope that one day we will all live in a liberating economy where transactions are safe and easy.